On Food Systems: FAO calls for less dependence on fossil fuels and more...

As many of you know, I'm a strong advocate for strengthening our local and regional food systems.  Having a diversified food production system is, in my opinion, essential for local and regional food security.


Below are three articles I am passing along.
1) The first, about the rise in food prices, should be sort of obvious for anyone responsible for grocery shopping.  If you haven't noticed an increase in food prices or other items over the past few months, you are fortunate.  Global food prices on the rise again, says World Bank


2) This second article, discusses a report just released by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), calling for less dependence on fossil fuels to increase food production.  This report and article is heartening, as anyone who has taught anything about sustainable agriculture knows we DO have the technology and methods to grow food more sustainably and using less fossil fuel.


FAO calls for less dependence on fossil fuels to increase food production


The report suggests using such techniques as improving water use so as to ensure less water is wasted (like watering at night or during the cooler parts of the day), as well as reducing, recycling and streamlining waste.  I would also suggest we consider the current 'scale' of agriculture, and think more in terms of integrating agriculture into our urban and suburban environments (at least here in the U.S.)


3) The third article discusses a report from global scientists with policy recommendations for global food security in the foreseeable future.
Global scientists serve up food security policy recommendations


One of their recommendations which stands out for me is to 'significantly raise the level of global investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems.'  Again, for me, this goes back to my own thoughts that every region in this country has the opportunity to improve and enhance their regional food systems, and that these can be viable business and market opportunities.


In New York State, Governor Cuomo last year called for the development of new regional economic development plans.  I am glad to see in the Capital Region's Regional Economic Development Strategic Plan an emphasis on building regional agriculture and valuing "local" food.  I personally would like to see more of this happening, again, not just in the rural areas but also urban and surburban.  Whether its smaller scale farms or small-scale food production/processing businesses - opportunities abound!


Photos by Amy L. Stock (top: Homegrown produce; bottom: Maine farm field in winter)

NYC Rooftop Greenhouse

Life seems to be packed with work and projects these next few weeks. So, I'm going to keep posting by re-posting information I find.

This one follows my theme of 'Can NYC truly be environmentally sustainable?' Below is a link to a story that covers plans for a major rooftop greenhouse on the roof of an old Navy Warehouse in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. Plans are to produce a million pounds of produce per year using hydroponics (water).

If the average American consumes somewhere between 350-791 lbs of fruits and vegetables per year, this greenhouse could provide fresh produce for anywhere between 2,857 and 1,264 individuals. (Note: trying to find good #'s on average fruit and vegetable consumption proved time intensive, but these are numbers I found on the low and high end)

Here's a link to the full article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/nyregion/rooftop-greenhouse-will-boost-city-farming.html?_r=1

Enjoy!

(image from online article, Eric Michael Johnson for the NY Times)

Climate Change Awareness: Join Earth Hour 2012 - Sat March 31, 8:30pm

Launched in 2007 in Australia, Earth Hour was a public response to highlight the need to take action on countering climate change by reducing energy useage and energy emissions. Now an international 'day of action', you too can sign up to turnoff your lights for one hour on Saturday, March 31st from 8:30-9:30pm.

Go to the Earth Hour website to sign up.

More than 5,200 cities and towns in 135 countries worldwide switched off their lights for Earth Hour 2011, sending a powerful message for action on climate change. It also ushered in a new era with members going Beyond the Hour to commit to lasting action for the planet. Without a doubt, it’s shown how great things can be achieved when people come together for a common cause.

Though I personally believe we each need to take personal responsibility for our impact on this earth, and reduce our energy useage daily. I do believe these kind of actions really help highlight the importance of long term change.

Enjoy the lights out!

Can NYC truly be self-sustaining?

Can New York City, a city of 8 million people, Be Environmentally Self-Sustaining?

This is a question I've been thinking and pondering for a while, especially since last summer when I was researching some census data for a grant and was reminded again just how large of a population resides in this city - 8 million (this includes the boroughs.) Then, in the fall of 2011 I made several trips down to NYC, and each time, as I rode the train down and back up, I found myself pondering 'what would it look like for this city to be truly sustainable?'

Earlier this year I spent some time in the NYC watershed in the Catskills, and got an even greater sense of the vast resources dedicated just to provide this city of 8 million people with clean water. In essence, the NYC watershed begins up in the Schoharie Valley, at the Gilboa Dam, and then it's all down hill from there. More on this in another post. But lets just say, I never before quite understood how many acres of public land were off-limits to human activity just to help keep the water clean. It's fascinating. So, I've been wanting to write a series of blogs on what it would really look like and take for this city to be self-sustaining.

Then today I came across this article: Building the Self-Sufficient City: NYC Covered in Green, posted by SustainableBusiness.com News
An architect has been working for years on a design to 'green' NYC. It's truly in part the vision I had in mind. People growing food on patios and vacant lots; more bicycle paths, individual solar panels and water retention systems on roofs. I think for a city the size of NYC to become more truly self-sustaining, it will require this kind of relocalized effort.

I have attended several sustainable agriculture related conferences the past year, and always find it interesting when researchers studying the 'food shed' needed to feed NYC includes much of upstate NY, NJ, PA. Here's an architect designing a much more self-reliant city of 8 million. Check out the article here and Enjoy......

Building the Self-Sufficient City: NYC Covered in Green, re-posted from SustainableBusiness.com News

Birds on the Move...Winter Raptor Fest 2012

Spring approaches, and with that, many species are on the move, including raptors and other birds. The other day I saw my first Red-winged Blackbird of the season at Spa State Park. On Sunday, I saw a hawk, I believe was a Red-tailed Hawk, hovering around one of the highway overpasses between Albany and Troy. The hawk was clearly after the pigeons roosting in the overpass eaves, as evident by the pigeons that were encircling the hawk.

And, last week looking out my office window at the Community Gardens office in South Troy, which is situated in a commercial-district right along the Hudson River, I saw another Red-tailed Hawk circling the nearby building - it too looking for pigeons.

I love to see these natural "wild" species in such deep urban settings. A colleague and I were just talking about the contrast these kinds of experiences or natural settings in urban areas present. Somehow, this gives me hope that if a Red-tailed Hawk can adapt to changes in 'habitat', so may we humans.

This weekend however, is the opportunity to see some hawks and other raptors in their natural environment. March 10 & 11th is the WINTER RAPTOR FEST in Ft Edward, NY. This always looks like an interesting, family-friendly event. The grasslands around Ft Edward in Washington County are designated by National Audubon Society as an Important Bird Area (IBA).

According to the Friends of the IBA website, "The Washington County Grasslands IBA is one of the few remaining large continuous grasslands in Eastern NY. It provides critical habitat for state endangered Short-eared Owls and “exceptional” grassland breeding and wintering habitat for many other grassland birds, including almost a dozen other threatened, at-risk and rapidly declining grassland bird species."

Protecting our open spaces helps maintain critical habitat for birds and other wildlife and plants, and is essential if we are to maintain regional biodiversity.

I hope some of you will get out and enjoy this event, and, let me know how it is.

The benefits of heating with wood

Not everyone can enjoy the benefits of a wood stove in their home. For example, most apartment dwellers don't have the option. However, for me, when I was buying my house, one of the key buying points for me was that my house have a wood stove, which together with a pellet stove and some electric baseboard as backup, heats my home quite well.


Heating with wood is a lot of work - don't let anyone say otherwise. Most people I know who heat with wood spend a lot of time splitting and/or stacking it. However, once you're in a house for a while you get a system down as to when you buy your wood, from whom, and how. Most people start in the spring by buying and/or splitting then stacking green wood in the spring to dry for winter. Others seek out their deliveries of 1, 2 or 5 cords of dry wood in the fall.

Either way, it's work. Still, there is something very satisfying about the work you put in to heat your house, and then the final outcome - which is a warm toasty fire. When I get my woodstove going, it can heat my entire house w/o needing any other source. This year I had the fortune of having 3 trees taken down in my front yard - oak and cherry - both great hardwoods for using in a wood stove.

I asked the city workers, who took down the trees, to leave much of the wood. After several weeks of searching for the right person with the right sized chain saw, the big logs were cut up into smaller rounds. In early fall I rented a splitter and several friends and neighbors spent a Saturday helping me split the wood. If you've never operated a hydraulic log splitter - well, it's quite fun! And, I was set for the winter with wood.

Fortunately we've had a relatively mild winter, so not nearly the kind of snowy cold nights as last winter walking out to the wood pile in the dark. Still, the warm heat of wood makes it all worthwhile. There are other benefits too. Below I've copied an excerpt on the benefits of heating with wood from HubPages. The article provides a decent explanation of the multiple benefits of heating wood - so enjoy, and next time you're considering a change in your home heating system - consider a wood stove or masonry fireplace (even more efficient).


The Top 5 Benefits To Installing a Woodburning Stove

Ask most anyone what they think about woodburning stoves and the first words out of their mouth are likely to include something about looking and feeling good. We're drawn by some basic instinct to the warmth and comfort of a real fire, and if it's a fireplace set behind safe glass doors that keep out the smoke and mean an end to cleaning out the grate, so much the better.

In fact, it's not unusual to find people installing a wood burning stove that they don't actually need as such (for heating), but that they want as a centrepiece in their lounge or kitchen. How many times have you seen an Aga decoratively dissipating heat right next to a regular oven and hob? People naturally gather round woodburning stoves and kitchen range cookers - the same cannot be said for gas boilers and electric cookers.

Not Just A Pretty Face.
So, we like our homes to feel warm and inviting, and woodburning stoves tick the box. But woodburner offer more than eye-candy and feel-good factor. Modern wood burning stoves are able to accommodate a boiler, provide full cooking capabilities and be fully automated.

Many woodburning stoves can be fitted with a back boiler supplying hot water to radiators and the main hot water cylinder. Some, such as the Rayburn, are designed as a kitchen range with a full sized oven and double hob plus an integral boiler where a second oven would normally go. Systems intended primarily as woodburning boilers typically incorporate an automatic wood pellet fuel hopper and comprehensive timing controls, requiring virtually no intervention. Highly versatile? Tick.

It's The Utility Bill, Stupid.
In recent years, as gas and electricity prices have relentlessly soared, word has gotten out that those strange woodburning stove things are not only capable of providing a complete hot water and domestic heating system, but they're a heck of a lot cheaper to run than conventional heating systems. Modern woodburners are highly efficient thanks to improvements in manufacturing processes, quality materials and better understanding of airflow and combustion. Also, wood logs and manufactured wood pellets are essentially waste material, and therefore plentiful and cheap. That'll be a tick for economy then.

Follow The Carbon Footprints.
Everyone is now aware that fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) are a one way street where Carbon Dioxide is concerned. Fill your car with petrol and go for a spin - after a while the petrol will be gone and there will be more CO2 heading for the ionosphere. Do this enough and eventually there won't be any petrocarbons left to turn into petrol; meanwhile the atmosphere will be saturated with CO2 from all that was burned before.

Compare this with burning wood. Yep, it too releases CO2, but unlike oil we can grow more wood by simply planting new trees. The beauty of this is that each new tree we plant will re-absorb exactly as much CO2 as is released by burning the wood from a dead tree. In fact, a dead tree will give its CO2 back to the air whether it's burned or left to rot, so using it as biofuel is no more harmful than doing nothing at all.

But it gets better still. Trees take a long time to grow, so you can't cut down one this year and expect its replacement to be ready next year. The timescale is more like a decade or more, which means you need to have a whole lot more trees constantly maturing and absorbing CO2 than are ever being burned.

Also, commercially manufactured wood pellets and wood chips are made from recycled waste. Wood pellets are in fact compressed waste sawdust. So, we can tick renewable and recyclable - it's getting hard to see what's not to like where contemporry wood burning technology is concerned.

Future Proof
We already know that oil depletion is a fact, and that the world supply of fossil fuels is dwindling, which can only increase the price long term unless we move to other forms of energy. The regulations regarding CO2 output for new buildings have also become noticeably tougher in recent times, with "zero-carbon" dwellings being a serious target over the next few years.

In response to this tightening regulatory environment, many builders and architects now recommend installing wood burning stoves almost by default in order to make it considerably easier to comply with new building regulations on carbon footprints. Coupled with the fact that combining solar thermal heating with a woodburning boiler by way of an accumulator tank makes for a natural fit, it's interesting to see this technology that is in many respects little changed from its invention some 250 years ago, quietly establishing its place in our future. Tick.

source: http://kulekat.hubpages.com/hub/Top-5-Benefits-Installing-a-Woodburning-Stove

Is it really February...Nature mirrors the love within us

Happy Valentine's to one and all! This 'holiday' I am always reminded of the abundant unconditional love that just is, within each of us and in nature.

I am also reminded of my own 'love' I feel for this earth, for this very beautiful magnanimous place we humans occupy and share with all other beings. It reminds me of the words of one of my students in my fall Biology of Ecosystems course, who wrote in response to why she is taking this class, 'because I just love this earth so much!'. Her words have really stayed with me.

I was so moved that a student would acknowledge this love she feels for the earth. It also reminded me how many of us look to nature for healing, peace, and really - love. Somehow, nature embodies a sense of awe, wonder, love and beauty - and mirrors this within ourselves.

Earlier this winter, I was up in one of the most beautiful places I know in upstate New York, in the Catskills...and walking on what was perhaps one of the most amazing days of the year, a fabulous sunny, warm day, surrounded by mountains and water, when a woman walking by me said, "What a beautiful day! How could anyone not believe there is a God on a day like this!" I smiled and nodded - acknowledging what I know she was feeling was this deep residing beauty and love that just is nature.

Even writing it makes me smile - that day, the people walking, the sun, water, mountains, all resonated a deep abiding love which is both nature and our own human nature- in my opinion, what some call God, others call Gaia, regardless of what we call it, that day - nature, mother earth, God - was definitely speaking to her and all the rest of us...

So, as we celebrate this day whose focus is love - may we be reminded of the many ways and kinds of love that exist in this world, and of the greater love which nature embodies and provides...

And, not to forget our dualistic human nature, and the need for humor at our own human foibles, I must share another photo, which perhaps represents more than I even really know but I also just find hilarious - I call it 'Cupid Derailed.' Sometimes, this happens to even the best of us. Thank goodness for facebook friends who shared these photos... Have a great valentines day- BE LOVE! (despite what walls we may encounter...:)

Happy Valentine's Day!